Augmented Manipulatives
Augmented University superstruct Traditional manipulatives are tools used by students to learn. (Examples?) Virtual manipulatives are similar tools that exist in a virtual environment (such as a web page or virtual reality space). Augmented manipulatives, then, are a blanket term for manipulatives which may include physical and virtual parts. The term 'augmented' is used to recall 'augmented reality.' Here is a short video (3 minutes) illustrating the basic idea of taking Second Life objects and avatars out of the virtual world and into the augmented world: Math manipulatives Math educators regularly use manipulatives in their teaching. What are they? How can they be augmented? Homesteading manipulatives What augmented manipulatives can help teach people gardening, foraging, composting, and other skills for permacultural living? (notes from rtgarden)Urban Agriculture This is distinct from our traditional visions of homesteading. Growing food takes some space and some group co-operation. Second life can be useful because you can have on site apropriate technology examples of the solution to different problems. Most people need to live in their living spaces. The needs of people in living spaces are very different from the needs of plants, and it is better if the two spaces are at best connected rather than overlaid. Second life can be used to demonstrate existing examples of successful urban agriculture projects, as well as hypothetical idealized demonstration centers. Most people will be able to connect with material on services like apropedia, and extrapolate that to their own neighborhood situation. The eco village in Los Angeles used a construction project in a single building as a way of starting the rehabilitation of a section of Korea Town after the LA riots. They brought in more and more people and devised a work for food at a local restauraunt program. They also opened a bike kitchen, which taught youth to fix and construct bikes, each person creating their own bike out of donated used Bicycles. Second life could be useful for teaching grey water system management, aquaculture, solar systems, cobb building techniques, and all sorts of other skill sets. Manipulatives- These could be very useful for developing robotics, and other remote activities. For example, a system which has a video camera making images regularly, and a soil sensor with humidity and temperature of both the soil and the air. It would be useful to be able to remotely monitor a lot of hydroponic space (say on a roof top or otherstructure), or soil space in a greenhouse or field. The manipulative could be the connection between how much water, and what time of day the garden needs to be cared for. For gardeners these logs of data which show how feeding scedules and temperature and humidity relate to production are very key. Different types of disabilities can be offset by this sort of a system, allowing shorter bursts of attentive energy to complete gardening and maintenance tasks. =3d building and sl= there are a few limitations of the way second life can relate to fabbed objects in the real world. Most of what you see in second life is built with 'prims".These are modified versions of a few basic geometric shapes. These shapes aare clevery combined and textured to have the appearance of many familiar objects from everyday life. The thing is, they are not actually meshes which match in form and shape something which can be directly fabbed, or produced in regular life. Except for sculpted prims. Sculpted prims are created with meshes imported from other 3D modeling systems like Blender 3D. Usually the meshes created in blender that transfer over the most elegantly are symmetrical, like for example a coke bottle, a goblet or a light bulb. Realistic objects are represented in second life by a combination of texturing and shape creation. One of the benefits of a demonstration center would be to allow people to hang out together and learn about the different sort of projects, sort of a CCAT for sl. Many of the same solutions which are needed in urban areas, are essentially the same as what is needed in suburban and rural ones. A great example of a completely implemented urban food policy is belo horizonte in Brazil. In that case Urban centers provided a marketplace and a restauraunt for the local community. By that logic second life could allow urban shoppers to buy producs remotely, even from small scale farmers. Also, one of the greatest projects in Belo Horizonte is the community kitchens. They provide hot meals from much of the produce brought down from the hills. This allowed the elderly and low income residents to get regulat hot meals of the highest quality local produce. By this logic the second life learning situation should include a lot of culinary arts. If we are not going to rely strictly on pre-prepared food from foodcorp%, or from underpaid migrant laborers, then we need to train a lot more people to create hot meals for our communities and we need to re-think the way those meals are created and served.